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Now is the time to fix our sick planet

No matter who you are, what god you believe in or who you have voted for in the past, you know what’s happening in our world. And you know what that little voice inside of you is saying. Whatever rhetoric or so called clever arguments you may hear, in your heart of hearts you know the larger argument, the bigger picture, the important point, is that our planet is in serious trouble. Our species is under threat.

And let’s not kid ourselves anymore about when. The dominoes could start to tumble and we could all be wiped out within a few years. Let’s quit talking about future generations, and instead talk about now.

Right now, today: 17 of the last 18 years have been the hottest on record, and wacky unexplainable weather events are becoming commonplace. Glaciers that feed rivers and life-giving water for millions of people are disappearing, along with Greenland, Arctic ice and Antartica (which was expected to never melt). Trees are disappearing. Forest fires have been breaking records. Droughts have been breaking records. Growing food is no longer possible in many places.

YOU OR PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT WILL DIE

The particulate-filled atmosphere above the warmer ocean is holding too much moisture for too long, resulting in the sudden massive flood dumps that fill cities with 6-8-10-12 feet of water overnight. The same warm oceans are turning category 2 hurricanes into category 4 hurricanes with 200 mile-an-hour winds that knock over buildings, and along with tsunami walls of water, crush people, drown people.

They’re not statistics happening somewhere else. They’re your mother, sister, brother or best friend, and they will die horribly in your town soon. You might too. Your coastal city or island might disappear under the ocean.

After a tsunami or flood, with dead human and animal bodies rotting in the water, buildings on fire and heat everywhere — that’s when the mosquitos carrying diseases like deadly dengue or malaria start multiplying and spreading the pandemic. It may not be the destruction of agricuture from high temperatures and disappearing fresh water that kills us all in the end. It might instead be uncontrollable communicable diseases. This isn’t a Netflix movie. This is reality.

The oceans, lakes and rivers are full of our industrial, agricultural and human crap. The underground freshwater aquifers are disappearing. A human can last a few weeks without food, but only about half a week without water. It doesn’t matter how much fresh water there may or may not be left in the world. It matters whether you can get to it.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE

CHOOSE YOUR NEWS & CHOOSE BETTER LEADERS

The good news is that we can choose our news. We can stop focussing on sources saying climate change is a hoax, or it’s not that bad, or that clean energy will wreck our economy. We can stop being glued to, or voting for TV publicity-seekers and their disingenuous moronic antics. We can return to sanity and vote for people with some intelligence and education, who listen.

Do you really, seriously believe that we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t switch to cleaner energy? The scientists are saying we have a dozen years left. I’ve been talking to clean energy experts for two decades and I can tell you that we have already invented and totally verified every technology we need to solve this problem, even within that short time period.

The only thing we apparently haven’t invented, is common sense for the masses. It’s easy to blame the government or the corporations, and yes they have to do what we ask or we should reject them in no uncertain terms; but the truth is, not enough of us are not making our case to our leaders and voting with our wallets.

I don’t care if you unfollow me, I’m just going to say it: If you have a gas furnace in your basement, you’re part of the problem and you’re not trying hard enough. If you have a gas-powered SUV or truck in your driveway you are creating the leaking pipelines, the fracking chemicals in the aquifers, the asthma in your toddlers’ lungs. There’s no sense screaming at the TV. Change the way you buy. Change the way you vote, Change the way you talk about clean energy. Change the way you think about our world.

ECONOMICS – SAVE MONEY & SAVE THE PLANET

And it’s not all pain for gain. Quite the contrary. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. Clean energy will save you A LOT of money at home. Clean energy will save you A LOT of money on your car. Clean energy will save you money on your taxes, because no matter what the well paid liars continue to say, wind-solar-batteries have the lowest levelized cost for generating our electricity. Less than coal plants. Less than gas plants. Way less than nuclear plants. These are the real facts. Choose your news and stop listening to the 70-year-old lobbyists and ignoramuses with their fake facts.

Clean energy creates local jobs. Clean energy creates more jobs. Clean energy creates gazillionaires, for those who still love the American dream. Why is California’s GDP three times as big as Florida’s? Because they understand change and the future, and reality.They don’t get stuck in the past. The good old days weren’t really that good, and the old technologies are losers, compared with new and better, cleaner ways.

Is it going to be easy to change our ways? No it won’t. The most impact comes from expensive changes to your home and transportation choices. You will get all your money back times three, but there will be hassle and bureacracy and you have to do your homework, arrange financing, get the right results.

Buy better windows and insulation. Seal your building and install an HRV for fresh air with less energy loss. Electrify your cooling and heating systems. Use energy-wise heat pumps and geothermal for cooling and heating. Get solar panels and vote for a clean power grid. Buy an electric car and save several hundred dollars each month on fueling it. Save operating costs and capital budget at work with clean energy, and get promoted. Stop voting for morons, and choose people who are not afraid to talk about climate change, clean energy programs, making polluters pay, and increasing public transit.

In the end it’s really not someone else’s problem. It’s ours. We are the government. We are the corporations. We are the clean energy superstars. Our only viable home is quite ill, and it will soon get much worse very fast. If you care about your own survival, your family and friends, health, quality of life and a stable, fair economy, now is the time to make some significant changes.

THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW – WHAT’S YOUR LEGACY?

Now is the time to make your mark on history. We are either going to die horribly or we are going to be talked about by historians. Let’s not be remembered as the generation of short-term thinking, unhelpful hairsplitting pseudo-intellectuals, or FOX TV-educated idiots, that talked-talked talked, while making a piggy mess of the world and leaving it for someone else to clean up.

When you’re on your deathbed, do you want to look back and say “Well I made a strong argument that wind power actually warms the planet a bit sometimes?” Or would you rather look at your life and say “I cared about the real problems in the world. I cared about my family, my friends our health and our home, and I did something to make it a better place and to help other people.”